Private Purview

“Private Purview” looks at how three artists of different backgrounds traverse into the world of their intimate and personal memories. This exhibition began with a simple idea of presenting works from Adi Sundoro, Anastasia Astika, and Theresia Agustina Sitompul, who share a common interest — their fascination and curiosity towards printmaking. They have been consistently expanding and reinventing their own printmaking practice. Along the way, the artists showed another commonality in the way they visualize a broad range of human experiences through mundane objects and imagery.

The exhibition shows how these artists assign new meaning to these objects, which otherwise are often overlooked and taken for granted. Their works act as a trinket of our daily life, looking at our ideas of memory, home, relationship, and our subjective experience of the world. It offers a glimpse into the artist’s inner mind and at the same time invites us to reinterpret our own.

Through his body of work, Adi Sundoro has been investigating the relationship between humans and their essential needs. This led him to explore Indonesian staple foods such as fish, tempe, and fritters. He reprocesses these foods as artistic materials as well as its associative meanings in our society through forms and imagery. In Seri Bungkus Gorengan (2022), he addresses issues of privacy breach based on his observation of fritter bags, one of the most popular street snacks, which are commonly made out of discarded papers. This ‘print waste’ is often taken from confidential documents that contain a copy of ID cards, signatures, addresses, photographs, and other personal information. This installation not only highlights the irony of our society: on one hand we aspire for digitalization, but on the other hand, many business affairs remain dependent on printed papers. Displayed inside secured glass boxes, these pieces of information are not merely seen as administrative records but they also represent someone’s existence and perhaps the documentation of one’s milestone and journey.

Meanwhile, Anastasia Astika collects image snippets of places and people around her daily life from her point of view. She describes her works in this exhibition as “narrow extensions of the self” where these banal and sporadic memories are often meaningless when seen individually, but collectively, they compose a certain narrative of one’s life journey. In Outside from the Outset (2022) and Wrap in Those Sweet Memories (2022), Tika imitates windows, as if the audience are looking through them, which creates a sense of voyeur into someone’s space and surroundings while imagining their life. Tika is particularly interested in liminal space, those places that we went through every day, which feel familiar at a glance yet strange upon closer examination. In Long Excursion (2022), she portrays public spaces from corridors, roads, to the corner of restaurants and
cafes, while in 777,5 km Away (2022) she focuses more on private space. These snippets are her way of iinterpreting her concept of ‘home’. As someone who lives from one city to another, her concept of home becomes abstract and temporary. These liminal spaces serve as a reminder of where she stands and her existence.

Theresia Agustina Sitompul rewrote her personal history to understand the larger and immediate social context around her daily life. Her works deal with issues around memory and identity between various roles in her life; a woman, a mother, and an artist. Through the object she created, Theresia attempts to bridge her memory and her real life experience, to learn to appreciate and give meaning to those small moments. She took inspiration from domestic activities such as in Totem (2022), where she made a pile of folded shirts made of gauze displayed as a totem. This installation is a reflection of the mundane moments in her life – doing laundry, ironing, and folding them. It is a repetitive and time-consuming task, which at a glance may seem boring but actually became therapeutic to her. It is a moment to reflect on the past and to contemplate on the future. For Theresia, all her roles in society and life, starts from home and will eventually return home again.